Beneath the present church lies a small exhibition that charts the site’s long and complex history. For nearly nineteen centuries this ground has borne successive layers of London’s past, beginning with a Roman villa, the remains of which still survive in tessellated flooring uncovered below the crypt. Upon these Roman foundations a Saxon church was established, and in the following centuries a sequence of medieval buildings arose, rebuilt or substantially altered in the 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th and 17th centuries.
The church suffered devastating damage during the Second World War, and what remained was reconstructed in the 1950s by Lord Mottistone of the firm Seely & Paget. The surviving walls and crypt, combined with the results of archaeological investigation, reveal a palimpsest of architectural forms spanning the Roman, Saxon, medieval, and modern eras. Among the objects displayed are fragments of fine Baroque memorial tablets that once adorned the interior, testimony to the church’s role as a place of civic memory as well as worship.
